


Buzzfeed Unsolved: The Grim Specters of Hill House

by Scimitar_Foxtrot



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series), The Haunting of Hill House (TV 2018)
Genre: Child Death, Gen, Hill House is just a fucked up place, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Suicide, It's a comedy I swear, Mental Health Issues, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-11-02 01:30:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20576426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scimitar_Foxtrot/pseuds/Scimitar_Foxtrot
Summary: “This week on Buzzfeed Unsolved we investigate the legendary Hill House, one of the most infamous haunted houses in American history, in our ongoing investigation into the question: are ghosts real?”





	Buzzfeed Unsolved: The Grim Specters of Hill House

**Author's Note:**

> Shout out to Weaver for encouraging me and helping to flesh out the ending bits when I hit a snag.

The chiming of a church bell. The cawing of a crow. Panning over a green-tinged animated scene of a decrepit manor in the woods. Lightning strikes, and the title is revealed. Buzzfeed Unsolved: Supernatural.

“This week on Buzzfeed Unsolved we investigate the legendary Hill House, one of the most infamous haunted houses in American history, in our ongoing investigation into the question: are ghosts real?”

Two men sit in a pair of armchairs in what is very likely a motel room; the one on the left is tall, brown hair swept to the side, and he’s very slightly shaking his head in direct response to the question posed by his counterpart. This is a gag that has persisted for seasons now, and Shane Madej will never stop undermining the dramatics of their ghost investigations.

The man on the right, shorter with black hair and wide eyes, continues regardless. “This is going to be a particularly difficult investigation because, unlike every other haunted location we’ve visited, the owners of Hill House are very insistent that nobody step foot on the property, save the housekeepers and police, so we’re going to be doing things a little differently.”

Shane glances over, eyes narrowed slightly. “You know, I do remember this when it first happened,” he says, “and for a long time I thought that was really suspicious.”

Ryan Bergara looks over. “Oh yeah? You thought that—”

“I mean, it makes sense looking back on it,” Shane interrupts. “If my wife died tragically I wouldn’t want two bozos wandering around the property trying to talk to her ghost. And, you know, he let the police in, so it’s way less suspicious than you’d think.”

Ryan acknowledges this with a nod. “Yeah, well, we’ll be getting into that shortly enough,” he says, looking back to the camera.

* * *

A fade into black, then a Polaroid picture showing the infamous profile of Hill House. Ryan begins to narrate over the ensuing images and graphics in a conspiratorial tone. “Josiah Hill was born in 1853, in Boston, Massachusetts, and became known as one of the wealthiest shipping magnates in New England as the head of the Hill Shipping Company. He married Samantha Dupont in 1874, and altogether they had five children: Ruth, George, Hazel, and twins Annabeth and William. With the growing of his immediate and extended family, in 1889 Josiah decided to buy property out in the hills west of Boston and have a house constructed, the now-infamous Hill House.”

Did he call it Hill House? Like, did he just slap his name on there once it was all finished?

I believe so, I believe it’s always been called Hill House.

So this guy, he didn’t care that his name was just a noun,  
he just—

(wheeze) He just wanted his name everywhere?

He just wanted his name everywhere! “I’ll show them all how  
special the Hill name is! They’ll all see!”

So in your head, Josiah Hill is a mad scientist.

Well, Ryan, it’s more fun that way.

The narration resumes. “The Hill family moved into the house in 1891, and tragedy struck almost immediately with the death of fifteen-year-old Ruth Hill, who was found stabbed to death in the woods on the property only three months after moving in. The killer was never found, and it’s said that the despair over the loss of his firstborn started to drive Josiah mad.

“Tragedy would continue to plague the Hills, however, as Annabeth, who was born in Hill House, would die of tuberculosis in 1895 at age two, and George would die of complications from a hunting accident at age sixteen in 1901. Their mother Samantha, supposedly tormented by grief, hung herself in the attic in 1902.” As Ryan speaks, profile images implied to be the two Hill children and their mother are introduced as they’re named, and then flash into a color negative as their cause of death is explained.

* * *

The video returns to the two investigators, specifically to a downcast Shane. After a moment’s pause, he quietly says, “This is depressing as hell.”

“It’s really bad,” Ryan agrees, “and it literally only gets worse from here.”

Shane turns to face Ryan. “It gets _worse_ than this? Do you mean with the Crains, or is this still the Hills that are getting thrown back into the trauma machine?”

“It never stops getting worse for the Hills,” Ryan confirms, grimacing with the burden of what he knows comes next.

“Jesus Christ.”

* * *

The narration resumes with a fade to black, this time showing a photograph of the stoic, hollow-eyed Hill patriarch. “Josiah Hill outlived all but two of his children, and became increasingly more unstable with each death, with one servant at the house calling him, quote, ‘a phantom in his own home,’ unquote. He would refuse to leave the house, and eventually even refused to leave his office, which is where he’d be found dead in 1912, having shot himself in the head seated at his desk. Bizarrely, witnesses reported that Josiah’s expression was, quote, ‘absolutely terrified,’ and ‘like he saw the face of the Devil,’ unquote.”

First off, that’s weird.

That’s extremely weird, thank you.

Second off, I kind of love how people used to  
describe things back in the old days? Like,  
“he was a phantom in his own home, he saw  
the face of the Devil, he was stuck on a never-  
ending roller coaster of torture and death.”

Hahahahahahahaha

Back to the narration. “After Josiah’s death, Hazel Hill was named heir of the Hill fortune, including the house, but a series of mismanagements and con artists would eventually lead to William coming back into the estate in 1918. William, who spent ten years in an asylum for what is now believed to be schizophrenia, actually met his future wife Poppy Hayes while they were both undergoing treatment for mental illness, and they married in 1920 at Hill House. William would take control over the Hill fortune until his mysterious disappearance in 1942, during which time a number of shady activities are said to have taken place, such as bootlegging, and ties to the mob.”

* * *

Cut back to the investigators. Ryan is the first to speak this time as he says, “So this whole setup was basically a recipe for disaster.”

“How good were they at treating schizophrenia back in that time?” Shane asks, his expression contemplative. “Because, you know, mental illness sucks, but mostly for the people dealing with it, so if it wasn’t too rough for him that’s not nearly as precarious a situation.”

“They didn’t even call it schizophrenia until the twenties,” Ryan replies, “and also like, it was the early 1900s,and we’ve investigated mental hospitals from then and even later that were fucking awful, so...”

“It was pretty bad?” Shane guesses.

“Kind of the worst,” Ryan confirms.

* * *

Back to narration, with two pictures for William and Poppy Hill. “William and Poppy would have two children, Emily and Richard, but Emily died of the whooping cough at a very young age, and Richard contracted polio, eventually becoming wheelchair-bound and, according to legend, became only able to communicate by banging on the walls as hard as he could in order to get attention.” Images flash up of the two children, their faces blacked out to obscure any identifying features, and their photographs undergo the same color inversion of the previous dead.

“Josiah, as previously mentioned, then disappeared in 1942, with his fate uncertain for almost fifty years. In 1946, Poppy was found dead in her bathroom, having overdosed on a number of different pills, leaving Hazel as the only surviving member of the Hill family.”

I thought I couldn’t feel sad for rich people, y’know?

Yeah, well, as it turns out, enough disease and  
death and misfortune can make just about  
anyone a more sympathetic figure.

This is a bad story, Ryan, and I don’t like it.

“Ironically,” Ryan presses on, “Hazel Hill would manage to live a long life, being cared for in her old age by the only two members of the house staff still working for the Hills: Horace and Clara Dudley. It’s worth noting that these two staff members were the only ones left because hardship and death would plague the staff of Hill House just as much as it did the family. According to Horace Dudley in his only interview, he said, quote, ‘We stopped staying in that house after dark. I couldn’t tell you what it was, but it was being there at night that made things go from bad to worse,’ unquote.

“Upon Hazel’s death in 1977, the house sat mostly abandoned, maintained by the Dudleys with the dwindling Hill fortune that was dedicated entirely to that purpose, until it was purchased in 1992 by the now-famous Crain family: Hugh and Olivia Crain, plus their five children Stephen, Shirley, Theodora, and twins Luke and Eleanor. Hugh and Olivia made a living buying, renovating, and selling homes, and for them, Hill House was supposed to be the highlight of their careers. Instead, it became something much darker.”

So, there’s a lot going on here, but one thing that I want to point  
out is that they have the exact same setup as the Hill family.

How do you mean?

I mean five kids, three girls and two boys, and the youngest are twins.

Okay, you know what? A lot of the things we talk about  
on this show are bullshit, and this is definitely also  
bullshit, but I will admit: that is weird.

THANK you.

“During the summer of 1992, the Crain children all reported witnessing a whole series of supernatural events, such as random banging noises, the barks and howls of completely unseen dogs, and an immense number of ghosts, most infamously the impossibly tall Bowler Hat Man and what five-year-old Eleanor called, quote, ‘The Bent-Neck Lady,’ unquote.”

Can you imagine being a parent, and your kid wakes you  
up in the middle of the night to tell you that she saw  
a ghost and decided to call it a Bent-Neck Lady?

That doesn’t sound... great. It’s obviously just a  
case of an overactive imagination, kids make up  
all kinds of crazy stuff for fun, but that’s still not the  
imagination you want your kid to have.

I disagree, obviously, I think that they were seeing  
ghosts, but either way it’s disconcerting, for sure..

I’m more surprised that you didn’t go for the cheap  
shot and make a joke about me being the Bowler  
Hat Man.

(sigh)

And now you can’t make that joke because it’s been  
brought up.

Goddammit.

“Hugh and Olivia supposedly never saw anything supernatural, although while doing renovations in the basement, Hugh stumbled upon the skeletal remains of William Crain, who actually bricked himself into the walls of his own home, answering a decades-old question in what is possibly the most disturbing way possible.” A brief, relatively lifelike animation plays of a flashlight revealing a skeleton, jaw swung wide open, behind a broken hole in a brick wall.

* * *

Shane is shaking his head. “This would never happen on any of those house flipping TV shows.”

Ryan is silent, staring at his cohort judgmentally.

“It’s true. A skeleton that committed suicide by brick-laying? With the HGTV logo in the corner? That show would be canceled before the episode even aired.”

“...Anyway,” Ryan says, choosing to ignore Shane’s aside.

* * *

“Tragedy struck once again at Hill House, this time for the Crain family. Very little is known of this night, but what is known for certain is that Hugh Crain took all five children to the family car in the middle of the night in a panic, and then drove away from Hill House as fast as he could, dropping them off at a motel before returning to the house. Several hours later, he called the police to tell them that his wife Olivia had died, having apparently fallen from the top floor of the library. Initially, he claimed that the house itself had killed her, but would eventually change his story, claiming that Olivia committed suicide and that his previous statement was a result of being grief-stricken and sleep-deprived.

“Hugh was never officially charged with any crime, although tabloids tore his reputation to shreds and court fees nearly drove him to the brink of bankruptcy. During all of this, he refused to sell the house, and declared that nobody but the police and the Dudleys would ever be allowed to step foot on it again.”

Now earlier you said that you thought this was suspicious  
until you, like, thought about it.

If he wasn’t allowing the police in, that’d be sketchy as  
hell, and it’d be a problem the moment they got a  
warrant.

Right.

But it turns out that being a cop is the best chance  
you have at getting in the house, unless the Dudleys  
are willing to, like, adopt you, so it’s kind of the opposite  
of suspicious.

Except for the obvious question of, why the fuck would  
he not sell or demolish the house that his wife just died  
in and destroyed his life?

That’s less suspicious and more weird, but I dunno,  
maybe it’s a grief thing?

Or maybe there’s another reason.

You would think that.

* * *

“This brings us to our investigation,” Ryan declares, “which is going to go a lot differently than our usual haunted locations, because for obvious reasons, we aren’t allowed to actually go anywhere near the house.”

“Don’t trespass, kids,” Shane says directly to the camera. “You might think it sounds cool but it’s usually not worth the risks. We here at Buzzfeed Unsolved advocate for only doing legal stupid things.”

Ryan quietly gives Shane the evil eye. “...Sure.”

* * *

The video cuts to Ryan and Shane walking up a winding road, surrounded on all sides by thick greenery. The sun is hanging low over the trees, and everything is swathed in soft shadows even though it’s still technically daylight hours.

“So this,” Ryan says, “is the road leading directly to the property. We’re gonna get some footage from the outside and see if the Dudleys want to speak to us. They’ve only ever given an interview outside of the police once since the events with the Crains, so... fingers crossed.”

“I respect that,” Shane says. “You gotta figure like a million people have hounded them over dumb ghost shit for the past few decades, and they were probably already pretty private people, just the two of them out here. No kids, right?”

“There was never any record of them having kids,” Ryan replies, shrugging.

“Yeah, so, definitely just the two of them.” Shane turns his head briefly towards the woods, then back to Ryan. “If they tell us to fuck off I won’t be shocked.”

* * *

The scene shifts to a small house in the middle of a forest clearing, with a modest, well-attended garden on the side. Ryan and Shane are standing opposite a tall, sturdy-looking old man with a thick white beard and squinting, shining eyes. A caption names him as Horace Dudley.

“It’s... it’s an old house,” Horace says, voice gravelly with age and heavy with what sounds like decades of weariness. “Old enough that I was _born_ in it, in the old servant chambers. My mother...” He trails off, clearly thinking better of what he was about to say, changing the subject abruptly. Nobody comments on it. “I never knew it to be a kind place, or a lively one. Even when the Crains were there, the kids would make a ruckus sometimes but if you weren’t near ‘em, you might think you were all alone in there.”

“Have you ever seen anything unusual on the property?” Ryan asks, his tone on the cautious side, apparently worried about misstepping with the old man.

Horace thinks about it for a moment. “Not in a long time,” he says. “Things only ever happened in that house when there were people there to have things happen to them, and, well. S’hard to haunt an old couple who aren’t around much.”

“Do you believe...” Ryan pauses, as if to choose his words carefully. “Do you believe that the house killed Olivia Crain?”

Horace’s expression darkens at the name. “Missus Crain was a good woman,” he says. “Lively, bright, passionate. Hill House is stagnant, dark, and cold, and it’s bigger and older than any of us. What happened to her, it wouldn’t have happened anywhere besides that house.”

“Do you believe this place is haunted?” Shane asks point-blank. Ryan looks over in surprise, but the old man just sighs.

“It’s haunted by history,” he says. “Wishes, fears, hopes, regrets. A place can be filled with the love or hate of the people inside it; if you know the history of that house then you know what it’s filled with. There doesn't need to be ghosts for you to feel what everyone else in that house felt.”

Shane nods at this reply. “You know what? I can get behind that. All the prisons and asylums we visit are a bad time because nobody has a good time in prisons and asylums. Can we ditch the ghost crap and call it Buzzfeed Solved now?” he asks, turning to Ryan.

Ryan stares incredulously at Shane. “No.”

* * *

The scene changes to once again show the two walking along the fence surrounding Hill House. Ryan turns towards both Shane and the camera to begin speaking. “So in the book that Stephen Crain wrote about this whole thing, _The Haunting of Hill House,_ he talks a fair bit about a treehouse that Hugh built for the youngest son Luke. The thing is, nobody’s ever actually seen the treehouse from the outside of the property, and it probably couldn’t have been far from the house itself, so that’s kind of a weird detail that's always fascinated me. What I'm hoping is that we can see it, even if it's just from out here.”

Shane visibly turns this information over in his head, then says, “Didn’t they just move in to flip the house? Why would they build a treehouse at a place they were just gonna be at for a few weeks?”

Ryan pauses. “That’s a really good point, actually. I hadn’t thought about that.”

“Are we sure Steve wasn’t making stuff up?” Shane continues. “Because I gotta be real with you, if he fibbed about something like a treehouse he might just be fibbing about a house full of ghosts.”

“Or maybe he just mixed it up with another house they were at with a treehouse,” Ryan offers, refusing to have the whole thing dismissed out of hand. “Y’know, they lived in a lot of houses, he wrote the book easily a decade later, he might have mixed up some details.”

“I guess,” Shane says, shrugging and looking back towards the house. “Or maybe he made stuff up to make a better story out of a really traumatizing summer, make peace with things and get some money out of it. I’d respect that.”

Ryan sighs, as tired as ever of Shane’s skeptical bullshit. “You can’t cede the possibility that he got one thing wrong in an otherwise accurate story?”

Shane rolls his eyes. “When the thing you’re insisting is accurate is the stuff about ghosts, then yes, Ryan, I think it’s a little silly to draw the line at the imaginary treehouse.”

“Shut up, Shane.”

* * *

The sun is now just only slightly visibly over the forest, the sky painted with all manner of purple and orange hues bleeding into each other such that the edges are hard to discern between two normally distinct colors normally impossible to mistake for each other. Shane and Ryan have apparently fully circled the property, and between the lack of footage and Shane’s smug expression, this investigation appears to be a win for the skeptics. They stop in front of the main gate, the camera framing the front of Hill House behind them.

“Well,” Ryan says, “I didn’t expect a whole lot of evidence considering the circumstances, but I still hoped to get something out of this.”

Shane puts a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Well, Ryan, you’re an optimist. That’s what I like about you.” Whether or not Shane is being sincere is difficult to tell; he could be legitimately trying to cheer Ryan up, or he could be a sarcastic ass. “You did, however, want to see proof of a haunted house while standing like two hundred feet away from said house.”

The case is closed: he’s being a sarcastic ass. Ryan soldiers on. “The point is, Hill House is going to be even more unsolved than usual for us.”

As Ryan is speaking, the light flashes on at the front porch of the house. Someone behind the camera makes a startled noise, catching the two onscreen off-guard. An indistinct voice says “The porch light, guys, the fucking—”

Ryan and Shane both turn around in time to see the light turn off. “Well look at that,” Shane says, clearly amused at the development.

The light turns on a second time, and Ryan lets out an absolutely indecipherable noise that suggests both vindication and pulse-pounding terror. “Are you fucking _serious?”_ he asks, eyes wide as saucers. The light turns off again. “Are you _fucking_ serious!”

“Horace knew you were gonna be disappointed with the lack of evidence, so he or his wife ran over to the house and flick the lights on and off, let you feel good about yourself,” Shane offers with a shrug, watching Ryan’s apparent breakdown for the sake of amusement.

“Shut up Shane! Mrs. Dudley was asleep already and you saw how slow that guy moved!” Ryan is doubled over from the stress of this revelation, hands on his knees. “Olivia Crain was supposed to flash the porch lights twice when it was time for the kids to come back to the house. That’s her ghost, I would bet you anything.”

Shane remains completely unconvinced. “I’m gonna be real with you, that sounds like a really easy trick to pull for a not-ghost. Besides, we aren’t the Crain kids, so uhhhh, we can’t take that invitation even if it’s real, unless you wanna post a video of us breaking into private property online with our names and faces attached.”

Ryan lets out a long sigh as he stands back up, one that seems intended to calm himself down and settle his nerves; the fact that his shoulders are still tense and hunched suggests that he failed in this attempt. “I don’t know what’s worse,” he says, “the fact that confirmation of the supernatural would depend on me really obviously breaking a law, or the fact that you get to taunt me about it.”

Piano music begins to play over the video. Shots are cut together of Shane and Ryan departing from Hill House as the light bleeds more and more out of the sky and fades to night. Ryan’s voice resumes narration for the last time.

“To quote author and haunting survivor Stephen Crain, silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and although we didn’t get to see very much for ourselves, the testimony of those who lived within its halls speaks for itself, as well as the scarce but promising evidence we found for ourselves, suggests that there’s truth to the legends of its ghostly inhabitants. Still, for now, and maybe for the next hundred years, the case remains... unsolved.”

The screen goes black.

* * *

After a few brief notes of music, at the very end, there's one last piece of footage. Shane and Ryan are driving down a lonely, wooded road in the middle of the night. Whatever they’re talking about in the moment is interrupted by the sight of bright headlights emerging from the next turn. The car coming down the opposite lane is going well above the speed limit, thundering past the driver’s side like it was running from the Devil.

“What the hell?” Ryan mutters, each syllable drawn out by his confusion.

“Sometimes you just really got a hankering to go see Hill House,” Shane offers lamely. “Did you see the driver? Looked like he just got back from a wedding or something. Tux and everything.”

“Huh.” Ryan shifts in his seat to look through the rear windshield; whether or not he can still see the car is unclear. “Hadn’t noticed that at all.”

“Weird.”

“Yeah.”

**Author's Note:**

> Everything presented about the Hills that doesn't come directly from the show was spun up entirely by yours truly, because I needed some background that just wasn't covered in the show.
> 
> Side note, I pity whoever subscribes to me, because I do not make it easy to know what you're going to get. Lighthearted shipfic for a Disney film, then some tabletop RPG setting stuff, and now this. Remind me to actually work on one of my multi-chapter projects at some point.


End file.
